The Hate U Give

This a quick YA read, situated in the fictitious neighborhood of Garden Heights, a generic “ghetto” neighborhood in an American city. The narrator, a teenage girl named Starr, is witness to a police shooting. The rest of the book explores her dealing with the subsequent grief while also grappling with her role as a young black woman straddling the worlds of a poor neighborhood, her family, her middle-to-upper-class school friends, and burgeoning activism. The narrative progresses nicely to allows the reader to understand the forces at play in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods, and empathize with those situations. However, I felt like some of the sections of lazy dialogue that hit the reader over the head with messages, versus letting that play out more subtly. But maybe that speaks more to my tolerance of YA as a genre than the book itself. I still think it's a good book for young readers to pick up, as it well illustrates an all-too-common American narrative.